America’s worst gerrymander may soon finally die
The state of Wisconsin does not choose its state legislature in free and fair elections, and it has not done so for a very long time. A new lawsuit, filed just one day after Democrats effectively gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, seeks to change that.
The suit, known as Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeks to reverse gerrymanders that have all-but-guaranteed Republican control of the state legislature — no matter which party Wisconsin voters supported in the last election.
In 2010, the Republican Party had its best performance in any recent federal election, gaining 63 seats in the US House of Representatives and making similar gains in many states. This election occurred right before a redistricting cycle, moreover — the Constitution requires every state to redraw its legislative maps every 10 years — so Republicans used their large majorities in many states to draw aggressive gerrymanders.
Indeed, Wisconsin’s Republican gerrymander is so aggressive that it is practically impossible for Democrats to gain control of the state legislature. In 2018, for example, Democratic state assembly candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats — just three seats short of the two-thirds supermajority Republicans would need to override a gubernatorial veto.
The judiciary, at both the state and federal levels, is complicit in this effort to lock Democrats out of power in Wisconsin. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), for example, the US Supreme Court held that no federal court may ever consider a lawsuit challenging a partisan gerrymander, overruling the Court’s previous decision in Davis v. Bandemer (1986).
Three years later, Wisconsin drew new maps which were still very favorable to Republicans, but that included an additional Black-majority district — raising the number of state assembly districts with a Black majority from six to seven. These new maps did not last long, however, because the US Supreme Court struck them down in Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (2022) due to concerns that these maps may have done too much to increase Black representation.
I'm genuinely astonished that anyone can look at US history and call this organization of government a success.
Seriously. It was a solid first draft of a solution in a world that didn't have many contemporary examples to draw from, but then it was just left as a draft and almost never updated (with a few notable modifications for which "all men" were created "equal").
There's a reason we don't instill a clone of our own form of democracy when we regime-change a place.
Shitting on the US has become the new cool thing to do, so congrats on being a trendy edgel0rd.
And yet even as the US has become the world's whipping boy for all its ills, EVERY time something happens around the world, everyone comes running to the US to solve its problems. They don't run to China. They don't run to the EU. They don't run to Brazil or anywhere else.
War breaks out in the EU's literal backyard, and yet the biggest support from Ukraine doesn't come from its neighbors who would be most affected by a runaway Putin. Nope. The US is in there as soon as possible helping them out.
Earthquake hits some 3rd world country, and the US is shipping supplies before the ground stops shaking.
Pandemic spreads across the globe, and it's not the UK or Japan leading the effort to donate vaccines.
Spare me the anti American rhetoric. It gets old and rather tiring to hear from clueless fucks who have a bone to pick.